TechVirtuoso

Microsoft and Edmonton focusing on open government

January 15th, 2010 at 5:42 PM  2 Comments

Edmonton, Canada has rolled out their open government program using Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) solution, and is working with them to develop an website that will give citizens and developers easier access to information and suggest ideas that enhance public infrastructure and services. The city’s program uses open source components along with Windows Azure. The use of open standards and application programming interfaces lets local developers and the city’s IT staff easily retrieve data for use in online applications or mashups.

According to Port 25, “Microsoft announced the OGDI initiative in May 2009, with the goal of reducing the cost of publishing government data while simplifying data access by leveraging cloud computing and open standards, which is exactly what has been achieved with Edmonton.”

More information on OGDI can be found here. You can also download the OGDI “starter kit” over at Microsoft Codeplex.

Microsoft releases MySQL migration assistant

January 11th, 2010 at 2:50 PM  No Comments

If the pending purchase of Sun (owner of MySQL) by Oracle scares you, and you’re looking to get your data out of MySQL before it gets eaten up by that other evil empire, then Microsoft has a tool for you.

They’ve released a test version of their new migration assistant to help database administrators make the change over. There is a version for both SQL 2005 and for SQL 2008 or SQL Azure. The tool provides an assessment of migration efforts as well as automates schema and data migration from MySQL to SQL Server. The tool will migrate any MySQL 4.1, 5.0 or 5.1 database.

Microsoft makes other migration assistants available for Oracle, Access, and a variety of other database formats, so this new tool is not unprecedented. It is however the first time it has made tools for the open-source MySQL available.